1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, method and, more particularly, to an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer forming a system with a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Variable printing is common practice, which is to print by adding, to document data created by a PC or the like or image data scanned by a scanner, a variable field having data which changes for each print volume. Conventionally, when printing electronic data, a printer stamps a text such as “copy inhibit” on document data without impairing the visibility of the document. The stamp has an effect of suppressing copying of the document by adding data such as a text on document data.
The combination of the stamp and variable printing makes it possible to change data to be added by the stamp every print volume and print the data. When a printed document is copied, the source document can be specified from the contents of the stamp. For document data of a plurality of pages, the stamp is basically added to all the pages of the document data. When adding the same stamp to all pages, one basic variable field is set as a common field. By referring to the common field, data set in it can be added to all pages (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-175654).
Overlaying a stamp on document data impairs the visibility of document data. To prevent this, the user is prompted to designate the range where the stamp is added. Within this range, the stamp can be laid out not to overlap document as much as possible (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2000-209433).
The above-mentioned conventional techniques can add one stamp at the same position of each page when adding the stamp to all pages. However, these techniques cannot commonly use only some (e.g., the position and size of a field) of the properties of the variable field. For example, to modify the stamp data position or the like for only a specific page, the field where stamp data is defined must return from a common field to a variable field unique to each page. For this reason, some (e.g., the position and size of a field) of the properties of the field where the stamp is defined cannot be used commonly between all pages. For example, a document containing pages of different document sizes requires cumbersome work because the user must define the stamp using not a common field but a variable field of each page, and set the stamp position in accordance with each page size.
To obtain the copying suppression effect of the stamp, the stamp and document data must overlap each other. Especially when the user wants to protect specific data (image or the like), the stamp is laid out at the portion to be protected. For this purpose, the user must adjust stamp data positions or the like one by one, which is cumbersome work.